8 Hacks to Watch at Design West's Black Hat Summit

My next favorite black hack is using near field communications (NFC) to get into a smartphone. I guess something perverse in me enjoys the thought of messing with the carefully quaffed world of the credit card companies who are promoting mobile payments these days.

The session description says it all: “Using technologies like Android Beam or NDEF content sharing, one can make some phones parse images, videos, contacts, office documents, even open up Web pages in the browser, all without user interaction. In some cases, it is even possible to completely take over control of the phone via NFC, including stealing photos, contacts, even sending text messages and making phone calls.”

It’s an added bonus that the presenter is Charlie Miller, a member of the product security team at Twitter. It will be refreshing to hear from an engineer who not only uses Twitter but works for it. You do tweet, don’t you, Charlie?

I had the pleasure of working (mentoring?) Colin during one of his co-op work terms (5th page - Power Analysis for Cheapskates) a number of years ago. At the time, my interest was in the simplification of the mathematics involved to decrypt RSA ... which was merely a brute force attack combined with modelling of acceptable ranges. Power analysis was a concept which attacked decryption based on the profiling of routines required to decrypt internally and using that to extrapolate results ... why try to enter through the locked front door when the window is left wide open. Great idea.

Sorry, but I loose all respect for a journalist when they use the words "robot apocalypse" in an article.
You might think you were being ironic, but it is lazy and pernicious and every article written about robotics seems to be trying to scare the public.
This isn't 1950. No rational person believes that robots have, or are even capable of, hostile intent any more.
It is exactly that short of ill-informed Luddite attitude that gave China & Japan the scientific lead over the USA in robotics.